Church Tech Part 1

There are sometimes I lament being a techie at a church.

Perfect example: staff meetings.   When the children's workers say "12 kids made Jesus their forever friend this weekend" the High school/Middle school workers say "we baptized 23 this weekend" First impressions team "was able to pray with someone and lead them after to Christ of this message this week" the worship was "absolutely incredible".
I never get to say "we managed to bring 3 people to Christ because of the dutch angle on camera 4 this weekend"  or "camera 2 did an incredible job of demonstrating God's love with that pan" I mean come on that is just silly, and I know it is not a competition of "which ministry can be to most spiritual" (Spiritual Formations of course) But do you see my point? No one comes to Christ because of a camera angle, no one.  So why have cameras? why have tech at all?  I am going to explore/unpack this over the course of a couple of posts. I will let you in on a little secret, I am a little bias about the tech ministry.  To be honest, this is something I have to ask myself regularly, and my answer isn't always the same.

Let me start by saying, yes I see how many times I said "I" in the last paragraph, yes I am aware that prolly means I am treading on dangerous ground since this topic shouldn't be about me.  I agree, that said it's MY blog... this is how I am going to unpack my thoughts.  As I write this I am not really sure how it ends yet, so lets start looking through some standard arguments for/against.

For: The purpose of a tech ministry is to remove all obstacles from between the congregation and their worship/ learning.  Over simplified we make it so people can hear and see the worship and the pastor even if they can't from where they are sitting.  True and good.

Against: Sometimes though the tech actually creates more distractions the it removes.  True.    Sometimes that is because it's technology, and as is the nature of the beast if it can be plugged in it can fail. True and bad.

Sad but true

We recently traded in my old car for a newer used car.  This evening on the way home from dinner while listening to satellite radio "Step by Step" by New Kids On The Block came on.  I sang the first two lines before I realized what it was .... sad but true.

To blog or not to blog...

So why did I start ego-casting, the answer is the same reason I have a twitter account.  Because it's what good tech guys should do and I aspire to be a good tech guy.  Point of fact, I don't check twitter near enough to make it worth it, I am religious about facebook, I check it on Christmas and Easter.  The second reason is I have a pretty healthy ego... maybe too healthy, and since no one reads my blog I found it to be a humbling/cathartic experience.  

Today in the bay

I spent all day editing a video for kid city.  Now if you know anything about HCC then you would know Kid City is the focus for the church.  HCC philosophy is if you win the kids, you will get their parents.  Like a lot of churches with very laser focused philosophy HCC does it REALLY WELL.  This coming weekend is all about family ministries so they get a video for the weekend.  Luckily Brett our college pastor did an AWESOME job of all the pre-production, he had a shot list, script, and talent all organized.  Which of course means it was easy for me to stay ahead of the shooting schedule. We shot all day yesterday and I spent all day today in FCP.  The video is pretty much done, but I still got some polish to put on it

New years resolution- 3840x720 edgeblended

Christmas program 2010 at Hope Community Church was a redo on an oldie but a goody.  We did Willow Creeks Imagine, the original version.  If you have never seen it, it's a great show.  The script is good, and it's pretty much all around awesome.  However, we have done this one before 2 Christmases ago, so the challenge was to take a production we had done and make it new again.  Our answer to this problem was to steal a page out of the Camron Ware's playbook.  For those of you that don't know Cameron he is an awesome, passionate guy who knows what he is talking about when it comes to his craft.  Thus enterth environmental projection, now we had never really tried anything like this, and sadly we had to pull down all the parts to put them back in use literally hours after the production, so I didn't get any good pics, but you get the idea.

I know this looks a little underwhelming, but all the work lights are on... trust me in the dark it ROCKS!  As you can see we pretty much ignored that corner all together.  We couldn't make it line up and extend the distance that we wanted horizontally at the same time.... this was the compromise.  That scene is the backdrop from out stage extend out into the audience all the way around both sides of the room.  We had 7 different scenes we used throughout the production. To pull this off we used propresenter and the edge blending module.  Both of which we purchased just for this production, but we are going to get TONS of miles out of.  Both ProPresenter and the edge blending module are awesome.  Out of the the box it took the TD and I 10 minutes to edge blend this wall to the point we were happy with it... and since 10 minutes earlier neither of us knew what we were doing I would say that is a WIN.

So basically all this means that this year for our production I was responsible for content on 11 projectors... No small amount of work.  Where did the 11 come from let me break it down
3 for the left wall
3 for the right wall
3 on the stage
2 for IMAG
No pressure

This weekend

Just awesome and I have to share. 

My team

I typically try to keep my ego out of this blog, but today that is prolly not going to happen.  This week I was in Atlanta for WFX which is an awesome conference for tech people.  Well our production team was recognized at the conference.

We won the Solomon Award for Best Technical Production Team.  The key word in there is TEAM, I know how good my volunteers are but it good to be able to let them know that other people noticed as well.  For the record my team is AWESOME! They come and serve all the time and they constantly humble me with their commitment.